Chapter 36
36
Jagger
“ D on’t,” I tell Spalding, my voice barely a whisper. “You’re still a Federal agent, Frank. You can bounce back from drug charges, legally speaking. But murder, man, that’s unforgivable. You can’t undo that.”
“I’ll give you the club,” Knox tells Marlo. “Whatever you want. Don’t let him do this.”
Marlo steps in. “Frank, come on. Jagger’s right. We don’t have to kill her,” she says. “I’m perfectly fine with eliminating our enemies, but not like this. We have to be smart about how we do things, especially if word got out about your involvement.”
“Are you fucking kidding me, Marlo?” Calvin snarls and slaps Spalding’s hand down, then takes over the executioner’s role, raising his weapon at Robyn instead. “Fuck all of this. Everybody dies right now; I’m done talking.”
“Calvin—”
“Shut the fuck up, Marlo!” he yells. “I’m the one calling the shots, not you!”
A split second later, all the goons in the house come charging into the living room, weapons raised, locked, and loaded and ready to blow Calvin to smithereens. I chuckle again, if only to keep the chaos level at an eleven. I need the chaos and the distraction if I’m to get anywhere near Robyn.
“Boy, you done fucked up,” I tell Calvin.
“I’ll be with you in a second, you piece of shit,” he says, but he doesn’t lower his gun. He can see that he’s surrounded, that there are plenty of bullets waiting to obliterate him. There’s a glimmer of doubt and confusion in his eyes too. “What is this, Marlo? Are you really gonna play me like that?”
“I’m not the one playing,” Marlo replies. “More than once, I’ve told you: Don’t confuse me with Robyn or any other bitch in your life. I’m Marlo fucking Hughes. I own this town. I own you .”
“This isn’t right,” he mutters.
“Marlo, calm down,” Spalding says as he tries to intervene.
“I’m done,” Calvin hisses and squeezes the trigger.
I’m about to jump, no matter the consequences. The springs in my knees light up.
But a shot comes whizzing through one of the windows.
The bullet zaps across the room and pierces Spalding’s neck.
Robyn screams.
“Robyn, get down!” I shout.
A fraction of a moment passes as Spalding gives me a confused, downright terrified look, blood gurgling and flowing from his gaping mouth. He brings a hand up, but it’s too late. That’s arterial blood spraying out of him as he collapses in a crimson puddle. I can almost hear his heart stopping, one tired beat at a time.
BOOM!
The front door is blown apart.
Splinters fly out everywhere.
I jump and cover a frozen Robyn with my own body while Knox tackles Calvin and Diesel manages to free himself from his captors. I hold Robyn close and watch as hell itself unravels in the room.
“DEA! Hands up! Don’t move!” Ellie shouts as she storms in, M4 loaded and pointed at every single moving target. “DON’T MOVE!”
The goons start shooting.
She fires back. POP-POP-POP.
Calvin shoots back. A bullet hits him in the shoulder.
Marlo falls on the ground, completely stunned by the unexpected. Ellie didn’t come alone either. She’s got six more men with her, armed to the teeth. One at a time, Marlo’s men drop like flies.
A DEA tactical agent is gunned down.
I smell the blood and the smoke of discharged weapons.
I smell war all over again as I hold Robyn tightly in my arms and shield her from the gunfire. My shoulder burns with another graze. For fuck’s sake, I’m going to be Swiss cheese by the time this is over.
POP-POP.
“Ah, fuck!” I cry out, my Kevlar absorbing most of the shock.
It still hurts like a motherfucker, like taking a steel-toed boot right to the ribs. I can barely breathe, but I keep my arms wrapped around my woman. I keep my head down. I try to live long enough for Robyn to survive.
“You fucking—” Calvin’s about to turn his gun on us. He’s got a clear shot.
But Knox tackles him hard. He drives his head into the floor with so much rage and strength, I hear Calvin’s skull crack as his eyes pop open, the life leaving them. A peculiar haze drowns his shocked glare as death takes a firm hold.
“Shit!” Ellie cries out and drops to her knee.
One of Marlo’s surviving goons is about to kill her.
Diesel jumps him. I haven’t seen that kind of anger in a long time, but it’s more than justified. Mentally, I sanction every horror taking place. I sanction the taking of every life as Knox and Diesel fight, tooth and nail, to end this nightmare before it can hurt more innocent people. Finally, the last of Marlo’s men ends up dead on the floor.
Red and blue lights flash outside. Sirens wail louder and louder, and I feel Robyn shaking in my arms. I press my lips against her temple. “You’re good, baby,” I tell her. “You’re good.”
“Jagger,” she cries out, holding on to me with a tight grip.
“It’s over, baby,” I say. “It’s over.”
Knox curses under his breath and stands up, panting with a furrowed brow as he looks at me. “That’s good Kevlar, Jag.”
“Huh?” I glance down over my shoulder. I can’t see much from this angle, but I can tell from the multiple pain points in my back that I absorbed more than one gunshot. “Fuck me.”
“Jagger!” Robyn sobs, and I pull back for just a moment to look at her. My lungs burn from the physical agony unfolding in my ribcage. The aftershock is coming. The adrenaline is wearing off. “Jagger, they shot you!”
“Bulletproof vest,” I manage, grunting in pain. “Ah, fuck.”
“Sit the hell down,” Diesel grumbles and helps me do precisely that.
Robyn stays close, utterly terrified, as Knox rushes to Ellie’s side. Only now does Robyn even realize that Ellie’s here.
“El?” she mumbles, her lower lip quivering. “What’s happening?”
Marlo tries to get up. A Glock meets her, held firmly by one of Ellie’s men. “Don’t even think about it,” he tells her.
She knows it’s over.
Some minutes fly by as the ambulances and the medical examiner’s vans roll in, other times, they move slowly as Sheriff Bentley takes each of our statements in excruciating detail.
“Everything happened so fast,” Diesel says, playing his part. “I’m not even sure what went down. I just know there were all these guns pointed at me. I had to protect myself.”
“He was going to shoot me,” Knox tells the sheriff, pointing at Calvin’s dead body.
Bentley isn’t entirely impressed. He looks at Spalding. “And who got him?”
“I did,” Ellie cuts in as a paramedic helps her out of her vest and examines her shoulder wound. Another inch in, and the Kevlar would’ve stopped that bullet. I was lucky, ridiculously lucky. “I had a clean shot, and I had to take it. He had his weapon trained on Robyn,” she adds. “I’ll give you a full incident report, Sheriff.”
“What the hell happened here?” Bentley exclaims.
“It was a hostage situation,” Knox says, trying to catch his breath as a bruise blooms pink and red all over the right side of his face courtesy of one of Marlo’s men, if I remember correctly. “They were going to kill Robyn.”
“Ellie,” Robyn manages, still staring at her friend with genuine disbelief. I can only imagine what’s going through her head right now. “Is that you?”
“You two have a lot to talk about,” Diesel grunts while under the care of another paramedic. His face took more of a beating than Knox’s. I’m starting to think I have it easy with maybe a couple of micro-fractures of my ribs. It’s hard to breathe properly at this point. “Ellie is DEA.”
“What?” I gasp, shocked.
“I’m sorry,” Ellie tells Robyn. “I promise I’ll explain everything.” She glowers at me. “And you three made everything worse. You should’ve given me a chance to—”
“To what?” I cut her off. “We knew about a crooked DEA agent working with Marlo and Calvin. You showed up out of nowhere, telling us you were supposed to meet Robyn precisely when she vanished. What the fuck were we supposed to think?”
“He’s got a point,” Sheriff Bentley mutters. “My God, this hot mess is going to take forever to untangle. I’ll need help, more Staties, more everything!”
Robyn gasps and tries to get up, but she gets dizzy and I hold her down. “Kyra’s upstairs,” she manages, tears streaming down her cheeks. “I need to see her.”
“Paramedics are up there with her,” Bentley says. “She’s okay, I promise. We need to make sure you’re okay too.”
Ellie’s patched up and ready to give her statement while the first responder comes over to check on Robyn. After a pulse and BP check, she seems calmer. I guess it’s from the relief of knowing Kyra’s okay more than anything.
“We can’t let her come down here yet,” I gently tell Robyn. “Not with these bodies.”
“I just want to hold my baby.”
“I know, darling.”
Sheriff Bentley takes copious notes while Ellie tells him everything, starting with her undercover assignment. Slowly, Robyn and I let the paramedics do their jobs, nursing our scratches and making sure our vitals are on point as we listen to Ellie’s story. Knox and Diesel are equally enthralled.
“I was only supposed to watch out for gang activity pertaining to the Rogue Riders,” Ellie says, occasionally glancing our way with an apologetic look. “I wasn’t supposed to get in this deep, honestly. But I grew fond of you, Robyn. I saw how honest and hardworking you were. I wanted to help you, keep you safe. And once I got the bartending gig at the clubhouse, I could tell that my superiors’ suspicions regarding the MC were unfounded. I wanted to drop the assignment much sooner, but then Frank Spalding walked into the picture.”
“So you had no affiliation with him,” Bentley concludes.
“No, sir. And my SSA in charge will confirm that. In fact, I brought his name up during a debriefing session as soon as Robyn mentioned him and his investigation into the MC. It didn’t make sense, so I started digging into the guy. I couldn’t accuse him of anything, mind you. The DEA doesn’t take kindly to unfounded accusations.”
Diesel scoffs. “Of course. You protect your own.”
“Don’t you?” Ellie replies.
To my complete shock, Paulie walks back into the room. I didn’t even notice him leave earlier. By the looks on Knox and Diesel’s faces, neither did they.
“Paulie?” Robyn mutters. “What’s going on?”
“He’s with me,” Ellie says. “I’m so sorry, Robyn, guys. Paulie was my CI.”
I glare at him. “A CI?”
“Beats being Calvin’s guy, don’t you think?” he quips with a dry smirk as he sits down next to Ellie. “I snuck out as soon as I saw the flash in the window. Ellie promised she’d give me a signal to leave before all hell broke loose.”
“Part of the deal,” she says. “I approached Paulie as soon as Calvin got to Robyn. I had to do something.”
“Something?” I ask.
“Something was cooking in Redwood. I couldn’t pinpoint Spalding’s movements and I wasn’t sure if his agents were aware of what he was really doing here. I needed evidence, and Paulie told me Calvin had offered him a job with the Hughes family.”
“You didn’t tell us about that,” Knox mutters, looking at Paulie.
“Hey, man, I was stuck between two worlds with the DEA breathing down my neck. I didn’t want to; things got out of control fast,” Paulie says.
“Spalding had an agreement with Marlo and Calvin,” Ellie says. “I needed Spalding to bite, though, to break a few laws and internal regulations. I told Paulie to take Calvin’s offer and get close to Spalding, close enough to suggest planting evidence.”
My blood runs cold. She’s injured, but I could still smack her around a bit for all the trouble she’s caused.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” I groan as I straighten my back and realize it’s going to hurt for a while.
“I was building a case against him,” Ellie says, defending her decision. “And I promised Paulie I’d keep him out of the crossfire. To my astonishment, it kind of worked out in the end. I didn’t think Calvin would have so many eyes on the road, though.” She pauses and looks at Robyn. “I wanted you out of that cabin so I could take you into protective custody. Paulie warned me that Calvin and Marlo were gunning for you. It was only a matter of time before they’d find you. I underestimated their reach. You were here because of me, Robyn, you and Kyra. I hope you’ll be able to forgive me someday.”
Robyn stares at the floor, still trying to piece everything together.
“The timeline’s a little shoddy,” Sheriff Bentley says, “but I’ve got enough here to place Miss Hughes under arrest. I’ll oppose any intervention from the DEA, however. Given what happened with Spalding, yours will be the last Federal agency handling the investigation going forward,” he tells Ellie. “The FBI might be better equipped while you folks deal with your internal affairs, ’cause that’s a hot can of trash right there.”
“Yeah, my superiors will never live this down,” Ellie sighs deeply. “I warned them about Spalding, but they didn’t believe me. By the time I had enough evidence against him, Robyn was taken. I had to do something drastic.”
Paulie nods in agreement. “This was the best we could come up with considering the circumstances.”
“You stood right here while Spalding was ready to put a bullet through my head,” Robyn tells him with a low, cold voice.
“I knew Ellie wouldn’t let that happen,” he mumbles.
“What about her?” I ask, nodding at Marlo. She’s sitting quietly in a chair, hands cuffed behind her back while she stares at Calvin’s corpse. “What’s going to happen to her?”
“Life in a Federal prison if she’s lucky,” Bentley replies. “One thing’s for certain, though. The Hughes family is done for good this time.”
I like the sound of that.
Marlo starts crying uncontrollably, sobbing like a little girl. I wish I could muster a sliver of sympathy for the creature, but I can’t find any left in me. I save what remains of my energy for Robyn, who needs me close to her now more than ever.
“We’ll need you to come to the hospital with us,” the paramedic tells her after he’s done with the EKG. “Your vitals are good, but we just want to make sure, given your condition and what you went through.”
I wrap an arm around her shoulders and pull her into a long embrace. “It’s okay, baby. We’re going to be okay. We made it.”
“We made it,” she repeats after me.